"We are an unimportant restlessness of dirt, and yet (Dante Gabriel) Rosetti paints his dead wife Elizabeth, head tilted back on her impossibly slim throat, eyes closed against the golden light surrounding her. Clay looks on clay and understands that it is beautiful. Through us the Cosmos gazes on itself, adores itself, breaks its own heart. Through us matter stares slack-jawed at its own star-dusted countenance and knows incrediously that it knows and knows that it is Universe."

I refuse to die
Before my eyes have witnessed
A butterfly's birth

The Doctors point and whisper
With crude and handmade tools.
Pinch and cut and decompress
like blood soaked sweating ghouls.
A slash, a snap, a sting
make a finger move.
The swollen eye, it twitches
and the mouth begins to drool.

Still no heartbeat, still no life
in the body, three days dead,
yet there is the softest sentence
uttered by the head;
Slipping slug-like out
from desperate lips in dread.
With unfocused twitching eyes
this is what it said:

"Let this one thing still be sacred;
The shroud between the dead and living.
Let the sleeping dogs now lie,
The Dead we're never meant to sing.
"Don't bring Death to Living lands
Don't take back the hourglass sand.
Leave the idols where they stand.
Leave the blood on bloodstained hands."

The doctor ***** his head:
"Is there movement in the brain?"
Another doctor shakes his own:
"None that can sustain"
Sowing shut his lips they say:
"Disturb us not again".
But a wordless sorrow is intact
in the soul that still remains.

Once again they dig in deeper
to find the glitch that kills.
With their knives and scissors
and noises crude and shrill.
The dead head slowly drops
with eyes wet, wide and still,
that meet the eye of a mocking bird
upon the window sill.

I walk past the old woman
who wears unflattering red lipstick,
vivid as cartoon blood,
and jeweled chopsticks in her hair.
We meet haunted eyes,
full of defiant sorrows.

The pudgy little girl streaks past,
pigtails askew, sandals mismatched
by herself or a harried mother
she is either running to, or away from.

The boy with the closed face,
like a letter that no one opens
for fear of what it might hold,
reaches for the same book I am reaching for.
We smile at one another, surprised.

Such small things bring recognition.
We are the same inside.